Fast Government Increasing Our Capacity to Do More Good

摘要

I had the "privilege" of working in government at the height of the total quality management (TQM) craze. The agency for which I worked brought in some of the leading quality gurus from manufacturing who set about dazzling us with control charts and visions of a defect-free world. The premise seemed to be that if we grasped the fine points of a histogram better, we could revive our state's lagging economy. Of course, none of the participants made widgets, and the concepts of statistical process control didn't set their hearts on fire. The whole effort got lost in translation.